It was a world first. Clint Hallam became famous overnight when a stranger's hand was sewn onto his right arm by pioneering international surgeons in 1998. But on Friday, in a secret operation in London, Hallam had the limb cut off after revealing he had become 'mentally detached' from it.

Hallam, 50, stopped taking immuno-suppressant drugs several months ago and demanded an amputation. 'He requested the hand be removed and I agreed,' said surgeon Navey Hakim who performed yesterday's operation. 'It went very smoothly.'

Hakim revealed he had carried out the amputation on condition that his patient - a convicted fraudster - agreed not to speak to the press to earn money from his story. 'I asked for the telephone to be removed from his hospital room,' said Hakim.

The operation gives 50-year-old Hallam, an unemployed New Zealander, a unique status in medicine. Apart from being the first human to receive a hand grafted from another individual, he is now the first to have his right hand amputated three times.

Described as 'a chancer who spent years playing surgeons, fraud squads and journalists off against each other', Hallam is probably the least likely recipient of pioneering transplant surgery in history.

In 1984, he climbing a ladder with a circular saw on a building site inside an open prison - where he was serving a sentence for writing bad cheques - when, in his own words, he suddenly found himself sprawled on the floor minus his hand. He was taken to hospital with the severed limb. Surgeons stitched it back on, but it had lost all sensation and dexterity and was eventually cut off. Hallam was given a prosthetic substitute, but he demanded the real thing, scouring the world for surgeons who would give him a transplant.

'For years, I had one fixed idea: I'm going to get a trans plant, I'm going to get a transplant,' he recalled. 'I was prepared to go to the ends of the earth to meet the team capable of giving me my hand.'

In 1998 Hallam finally convinced doctors in Lyons that they should attempt a transplant. The 14-hour operation by French, Australian, British and Italian doctors involved separating and splicing bone, muscle, tendon and nerve from the right hand and forearm of a brain-dead French motorcyclist. It was deemed a complete success.

Hallam woke up expecting 'to find life had returned to normal'. He was quickly disillusioned. He discovered the immuno-suppressants that were designed to prevent rejection of the hand caused diarrhoea that made him shed weight at the rate of 4lb a day, . a loss that was offset by the pounds he put on as a result of contracting diabetes from his drug regime. This nightmarish struggle left him feeling 'more handicapped than before', he said.

On top of these traumas, Hallam was later seized by police in Lyons and accused of stealing £20,000 from a French liver transplant patient, Thierry Decottignies, who had befriended him in hospital. Hallam repaid some of the money and was eventually allowed to leave France.

He was, however, still being pursued by police in Australia over the sale of bogus cards for buying fuel, and is still wanted in New Zealand over other outstanding financial mysteries. For a man sought so much by police, the fact that he possessed two different sets of fingerprints gave him a special notoriety.

At the same time, Hallam was becoming increasingly distressed about his transplanted hand. Far from being a cosmetic miracle, the new limb had all the attraction of a Frankenstein reject. 'The flesh is pink, whereas Hallam's is tanned,' wrote one journalist last year. 'The outer layer of skin is flaking off. There are leathery light-brown patches where should be fingernails.'

This unpleasant status was the fault of Hallam himself, said his surgeons who accused him of not taking his immuno-suppressants. 'He went without drugs for weeks,' they said, pointing out that they have since done another six hand transplants. All are performing perfectly.

For his part, the perennially cash-strapped Hallam said he simply could not afford his £10,000-a-year drug bill. So he stopped taking his medicine two months ago and sought amputation instead.

'This was an irreversible rejection,' said Hakim. 'There was nothing emotional about it.' He added that Hallam had received some funding from 'a private donor' for the operation, and is expected to stay in hospital until later this week. It is understood Hallam cannot return to New Zealand, and will stay in Britain or travel to the US.

'The longer the hand stayed on him, the longer it cost him money,' Hakim said yesterday. 'He just said "thank you" to me after the operation, and I felt he was being genuine. He is free of the burden of the last few years. That hand was something that he could no longer afford to possess.'